Huxley and Orwell

Last week, during our Summer Institute at University of Manitoba, we had a few meandering discussions of how technology is influencing humanity. Discussions of “it’s all changing” are common. The greater challenge is to engage in “what are we becoming”. At one stage, I made the point that two writers framed the concerns facing society: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Orwell emphasized the threat we face from “big brother” – an organized government/political structure that determines and limits our rights (and in the process, our humanity). Huxley, on the other hand, suggested that the real enemy is not the government, but rather humanity. We are our greatest threat. Our desire for pleasure, and the paths through complacency and passivity this desire leads us, is what we should be most concerned about.
With that conversation in mind, I was rather pleased when I came across amusing ourselves to death – a comparison between the world views of Huxley and Orwell (via Frances Bell).

This was written by gsiemens. Posted on Tuesday, July 21, 2009, at 8:51 am. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

The trouble is it is very difficult to spot historic trends other than through the rear view mirror by which point it is too late and all too easy to apply prejudice to anecdotes when predicting the future.
Best wishes
Hugh

I have seen the netgen post, but not Catherine’s. I’ll have a look. While it is true that trends are difficult to spot while living through them, periods of extreme change suggest that we must at least get better than we are. The link to the article – Huxley – gets at this: inconsequential reduce our ability to notice the consequential.